I don’t know how to feel about sex. Suddenly, the idea makes me want to cry. I don’t have these memories of being a girl and looking forward to the day I would lose my virginity. As a girl, I was petrified of boys. And it wasn’t about cooties. No, I feared them without ever even realizing it, and I still don’t understand. And I want to. Of course, I want to understand why I’m like this.

I can trace the fear as far back as 1999. I have stories dating back to then—when I was twelve—of uncles and fathers and grandfathers raping these little girls, forcing them into situations little children should never be in.

I described these things in such awful detail—so accurately, when I reread them now, I shudder at the depth of the darkness I gave them. These girls were what I understood at twelve. I knew what going on in the heads of these girls who were living in daily terror; I understood them so well, I could shape my words to give these girls a voice and a body and the often subtle ways of someone who’s seen too much.

So what the hell happened to me at eleven to make me write these things? What the hell can’t I remember or won’t admit? These voids in my memory are killing me. I’d rather suffocate than suffer this.

That’s when I have panic attacks: when death would be a mercy to the hell going on in my head. The mental anguish gets to be too much. My mind shocks itself with too much information, just to make the pain stop for a little bit. And afterward, for a little while, it does—sometimes for hours.

Sometimes it’s only a second before my brain has to do it again.

Those are the really bad days, when my mind has to reset itself again and again and again and it just won’t stop. It hurts so much and I cry and I cry and—it goes on like that, building and building until I fall asleep, exhausted.

When I wake up, sometimes things feel better. Usually, I’ve gone back down in intensity from 10 to 8, and I’m hovering there, waiting for the bad to buildup inside my guts and head again, to strangle my breathing and keep me on the edge of madness.

Madness. I suffer madness daily. There are things I once thought I would never stop feeling, they would never stop haunting me. Now, I’m surprised when I suddenly recall an old belief. I hope this constant madness will become one of those things. I hope this problem with sex will become one of those things.

How should I feel about sex? It’s like asking me how I should feel about madness. Dumb questions. I know there is no “should” when it comes to feelings. They are what they are. The question is, what do I feel about sex?

Fear. Apprehension. Reluctance. Revulsion, sometimes. Oftentimes. I need to embrace that and stop judging myself about it. A lot of women feel this way about sex. Some of them weren’t even raped but made to feel dirty in other ways. After the act is done, we continue to make victims of ourselves. I can’t be that anymore. I won’t be a victim to my fear. I’ll be committing myself to a life of constant rapes that penetrate my sense of self-worth instead of my body.

I need to look in.

The male body isn’t attractive to me in any way.

There. I said it.

Sure, there have been exceptions. But the vast majority of men have awkward bodies that move in unappealing ways. They’re not the soft curves of a woman. They’re not the snaky moves of a seductress. They have other qualities: strength, mainly, and some sort of adorable quality in the face and eyes. Perhaps it can be described as kindness. If you have that as a man, you’ve got your foot in the door. You still have to prove you’re more intellectually agile than I am and you’re not going to rape me, but what I’m saying is, I’m not thinking about a man’s body when he’s fucking me. He’s a penis and a mouth. Now, I also make sure there’s a man I respect attached to those things. That turns me on: a penis with a great personality.

And I like the feeling of being filled. But honestly, a woman can do that pretty damn well.

I guess I just like men’s personalities, some of them. I like the balance of kindness and strength. It’s why I love and respect my boyfriend.

From women, I like their sensuality, their softness, and their wile. And I love watching them try to be such good girls. They try so hard. I love helping them find the strength that’s already in them, watching them change from moment to moment from little girl to strong woman and back again. We women are crazy, and I love it. We’re people I can feel truly passionate about.

So there are parts of my sexuality I enjoy: I see myself in my partner—the balance of kindness and strength, the vulnerability and the wile—and I enjoy exploring that in myself and them through this dynamic self-expression.

I just wish it didn’t hurt when he goes into me. I wish it didn’t remind me of my many run-ins with Andy Humanstein. And I wish women would stop dragging me into their self-destruction, pulling and pushing me toward and away, toward and away, because they refuse to believe fear as a family tradition is not a commitment they have to uphold.

Those parts of sexuality, of being and sharing myself with another person, are the hardest. They both, men and women, have hurt me too much in too many different ways. In those moments, they make me not want to ever share my body or myself ever again.

But I can’t stop expressing myself. That is a suffocation no panic attack could outperform. Stopping these expressions means committing myself to a lifetime of rape flashbacks and fear and shame. I’m not doing that. Times have gotten better for me. Times can still get better. This fear I have that things will always be bad is only in my head, built up on a pedestal of thoughts about my lack of self-worth. How, if I think I’m a bad person, can I enjoy being naked with this other that I see as a reflection of the best parts of me? Of course, I get scared. I start thinking I’m awful, thinking I’m a fool, and then I also start thinking I’ve made a horrible choice trusting this person. I start remembering the other times I’ve made bad decisions about who to trust, and suddenly I’m having a full-blown panic attack during sex, forgetting who’s inside me, convinced it’s Andy again. I’m sure you can imagine how that exacerbates the shame and fear I associate with sex.

Maybe I’m over-intellectualizing this. I have to consider that. But even if I am, it’s a healthy thought process: if I think better about myself, I’ll trust my own decisions, thereby foster an environment where I feel comfortable questioning my decisions, thereby keep a partner I respect, thereby respect my relationship with them, and, ultimately, I’ll feel comfortable expressing myself with this wonderfully flawed human being.

Ha! So the conclusion seems to be sex is about me. However I feel about me, that’s how I feel about sex. And since I refuse to feel bad about myself and who I am, I’m not going to feel bad about sex either. I’m better than that.